Of that same old thing that we call love

There are people who are just born to be in love. I am one of them.


There are people who are born to be loved. I am not one of them.


I am not Anna Scott, who found her love at the end of the movie.


I have loved. A little too many times. I’ve been loved. By too many. Never for the right reasons. I am 35 now. The grease paint doesn’t look too good on my skin, which never got used to it in the first place. I’ve money to change the way age sits on me. But I refuse. And for that the movies left me. I have no complaints. I did love acting, but only under the spot lights. When acting percolated too much into the way I brushed my teeth, read my morning paper or sipped my coffee, I began to hate it.
I loved yes. The first ever actor I acted with, the first person I kissed—not under a tree, while shivering in the rain like my poor 17 year old self dreamed—but in front of a camera, the director’s beady eyes looking for a moment to call “Cut” and probably 70 spot boys who stood on top looking down on us, probably seeing my breasts too through the v-neck of a top that was supposed to show off my youth. It wasn’t perfect in the real sense of the word, but it was, under the circumstances. The movie ended, me and my breasts became famous, and my first love got lost somewhere along the way.


I fell in love again, with the dimples and the smile of a director who gave me my first “woman centred” role. He made me the centre of his world too. Or so I thought until he got married to my then close friend.


I fell in love yet again with the gentleness of my manager, the witty talk of my driver, the love for Dali of a reporter, the kalari teacher who tutored me for a film, a business man who had an art gallery and would let me sit in front of Water Lilies as long as I wanted... yes I fell in love. Too often. Too soon. For too many reasons.


I am 35 now. The tabloids gave up on me a long time ago. I told you—the grease paint just doesn’t sit on my face anymore.


I am pregnant. I know who the father is. But I don’t think about him. I think I did my best acting there that night with him. I remember Monet’s “Poppies at Argenteuil” hanging at the foot of the bed. I dreamt me walking between the red poppies, a little pair of feet behind me. The dream is now in me. The dream of someone to love and be loved at last.


How selfish love makes us.

The state of being

Maybe it’s because I’ve always loved Calvin, or maybe it’s because no one is more succinct than Calvin, whatever the reason I follow him now...to the state he was in, in Mrs wormwood’s class—“The state of denial”.


But maybe it’s not complete denial too...maybe there is no term for it. Not when your heart sighs when you see the forwards he sends on Gmail which has your name too, but you think of those days when your name used to be the first name on the sent to list, and now it comes, trailing, in alphabetical order somewhere towards the end. It’s not denial is it, when he still calls you every now and then and you’d expect the conversation to end in an “I love you”, but ends in a “take care and keep in touch”. It’s not denial at all is it when you see him put up pictures of them together—happy and smiling, and you smile along with them, but somewhere your memory cringes that your photos never came up in any of those pages.


Is it denial when you still think and dream about the past and the impossible future as a possibility? Denial is not that is it, when you go about your days as if nothing happened but the late nights and late mornings are just about sleep now, and not what is used to be—of warmth, kisses and blankets, of nakedness and sweat, of love and wine, and poetry. Would it be denial if you thought about him as the perfect person, even while he was searching for perfection elsewhere?


Would it be denial if you loved someone so much that forgiving was easy but forgetting was not?